| Wednesday, July 3, 2002 |
18:37 - Minority Report Report
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Chris and I saw Minority Report last night, and I must say it's every bit as good as everyone has said. It's a lavish and surprising storyline with lots of very satisfying twists, the cinematography is somehow both rich and gritty, the casting and characterization is outstanding (the woman in the greenhouse merits buying the DVD all on her own), and the tech design is truly something to behold. I so dearly love it when a movie about The Future (2054 in this case, I believe) doesn't look entirely alien-- you know, a setting that looks about as odd to us as today's world would look to people in 1950. Yes, the infrastructure is somewhat different, there's a lot more technology in people's pockets and on people's desks-- but it's still all cars and roads and ice-cream cones. Likewise, in MR, the cars are ingeniously designed to fit into a chaotic but well-organized commuter structure, and they've got those transparent computer screens that moviemakers are so fond of-- sitting right alongside spray-bottles and lawn sprinklers and kids' bicycles and playground equipment that could just as easily have been bought in Wal-Mart today. That kitchen timer that the eye surgeon uses (another brilliant character, by the way) is styled like a timer from the 1970s, but with a luminous and interactive dial. Instead of the "future of the past" that the Rocket Age gave us (think Jetsons), here we have a future with retro. I love it.
Likewise, the virtual interface that the cops use to sort through the imagery they're fed is a brilliant piece of iconic humans-interacting-with-machines the like of which I haven't seen since Fritz Lang's Metropolis; it's the same kind of system of gestures, firm and forceful-- something of a three-way cross between Tae Kwon Do, cyborg-like mechanical movements, and the nuanced touch of a symphony orchestra conductor. (The classical music overlaying the scenes where Tom Cruise conjures up those images is just as effective as the warm chamber jazz in Cowboy Bebop-- which is to say, very much so.)
And there's so much unexpected humor in the movie. The way the quarrelling couple interacts with the spiders, the cereal box with the moving digital-ink logos-- the script smirks at you from beginning to end, not letting up even when the action gets heaviest. It's hard to suppress the giggles when Cruise tries to pull his old eyeballs out of a bag to show to the retina-scanners, and they roll down a slope and into a drain grating like a couple of prized aggies.
But...
There's one problem with this movie, without which it would be drop-dead brilliant. (This is actually Chris' observation, but I'm sure he won't mind me broadcasting it-- after all, he doesn't have a blog; he just fact-checks mine's ass.) It's the last two minutes. The movie gets Spielberged. Right up to the last gunshot, the plot careens and power-glides, jerking the audience expertly back and forth... but then, right after that last shot, you'd better just stand up and walk out of the theater and not look back. Because everything gets tied up with a neat little warm and happy epilogue that feels entirely out of place. It's like hearing "And they lived happily ever after" at the end of The Terminator. As the credits rolled, Chris sat in his seat shouting at the screen: NOOOOOO! YOU BASTAAAARD! DAMN YOUUUUU!
...Incidentally, am I the only one who noticed that this movie and Harry Potter seemed to be cut from the same cloth? They both have funky tendril-vines that grab for you, and they both are packed full of pictures that move-- newspapers, cereal boxes, trading cards, wall ads, paintings. It's like Harry Potter is really just the future-- you know, because the technology in Minority Report is sufficiently advanced that we can't distinguish it from magic.
... Okay, maybe I should just shut up before I dig myself in waaay too deep.
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18:00 - Tomorrow
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The fireworks have already started going off. I heard and saw a lot of them last night. That's two full days early. I can't remember that ever happening before.
What do I think is going to happen tomorrow? I don't know. I suspect that there will be some kind of major attack attempted, but it will be foiled; and we probably won't find out about it until a month or so later.
Myself? I'll probably be staying home, maybe taking a ride through some backroads. If everything's still standing when I get back, I expect I'll feel pretty darn good.
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17:56 - We'll show them what freely held elections are all about...
http://talg.blogspot.com/2002_06_30_talg_archive.html#78505990
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From Tal G:
Some other [Palestinian] demonstrators explained what the "right to decide" means:
"Any collaborator who would represent himself an alternative to [Arafat] will be executed in the public square," said the message, which echoed through the streets as armed men fired in the air.
See, there's the rub. "Peace negotiations" are a concept that depends on both sides willing to reach a compromise, mutual sacrifices and voluntary changes that allow both sides to retain a measure of their respective aims.
But... these people don't compromise. Everything's all-or-nothing. I hate to say it, but it is a black-and-white world to many, many people out there; and when one side persists in thinking that it's all about shades of gray, the other side (who sees it all in black-and-white) will cause a lot of people to die while we wait for the gray-shaders to define terms and write up resolutions.
These are the rules of this game. We either play using tactics that can win, or we change the rules altogether. We can't beat a bunch of football players if we arm ourselves with ping-pong racquets.
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09:55 - The Word of Love Spreads
http://www.coldfury.com/Entries/00000152.html
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Mike at Cold Fury seems to have run across the now-semi-famous article by Courtney Love on record companies, Napster, and the RIAA, which has surfaced in a new location-- namely, her band Hole's own website.
Says Mike,
Maybe Courtney ought to take up blogging.
Yeah, check out the "News" box on holemusic.com's main page. Kinda looks like she's already doing that.
Which doesn't surprise me, really; Courtney's seemed to have a very progressive and admirable view of technology, from what I've seen-- kinda like discovering blogs by people like Ian McKellen. Love's article, to the best of my knowledge, was first published in Salon in June 2000, and it's been circulating back and forth since then, appearing here in this blog from time to time. I wonder if maybe I should see if I can set up a permalink to it so I can be doing my part to make sure everybody has a chance to read it.
I don't use her article to give myself carte blanche to steal music indiscriminately. I still think that's wrong, and will continue to be as long as our current system endures. But I do use the article to inform my opinion about what's going to happen to the music industry-- the record companies are going to have to undergo a catastrophic transformation if they're going to survive at all, and it's going to happen very soon. And in the meantime, I don't lose too much sleep over whether a stolen CD worth of MP3s is hurting the artists-- because I know from this that it's hurting only artists who "fear their own filler", as Love puts it, and it's hurting the labels a helluva lot more.
In all honesty, the first time I'd ever heard of Courtney Love was when I was reading this article; the only indication that I had of her being some kind of reviled figure in music was the lascivious picture of her at the top of the article in Salon. I figured she must be somebody that most people consider a ditzy blonde slut, and reading the article I was inclined to believe there's a lot more going on in her head-- in particular, a greatly sarcastic sense of irony-- than most people are likely to realize.
If this is the voice people need to hear delivering the message, hey, let it be so.
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| Tuesday, July 2, 2002 |
13:50 - Palladium Laid Bare
http://www.zdnet.com/anchordesk/stories/story/0,10738,2873149,00.html
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Newsweek's Steven Levy (most notably) broke the story of Microsoft's "Palladium" initiative-- the one where they propose to incorporate hardware-level public-key crypto authentication and digital-rights-management into every computer. However, if I'm reading this article by David Coursey aright, Levy's scoop was something that Microsoft had hoped not to have to talk about for a good long time yet.
But then some smart reporters--including Michael Cherry of Directions on Microsoft (a frequent radio guest of mine) and Newsweek's Steven Levy--discovered that Microsoft had filed for a patent on an operating system with built-in digital rights management features.
Microsoft tried to keep a lid on the story for as long as possible. But after finding out that Levy was going to print something, the company invited him to Redmond for two days to hear the whole story. Even then, Microsoft didn't expect the story to run so soon. When it discovered that Levy's story was about to hit the streets, Microsoft barely had time to warn those of us who were maintaining our silence that the secret was almost out of the bag.
I'm telling you all this because Microsoft would have been better off staying silent on this one. The reports that are surfacing are going to raise many more questions than Microsoft has answers for.
I'm really starting to like Coursey. He's exactly what I like to see in the tech press: a reporter who's not afraid to go out, do some digging, try new things, and change his stance and opinions if what he finds disagrees with his preconceptions. No, he wasn't one of those who were taken up to Redmond for the emergency Palladium indoctrination-- but he's revealing something a good deal more important than what Microsoft has cobbled together by way of boilerplate; namely, the circumstances surrounding this scoop in the first place.
Levy, after all, didn't mention that Palladium wasn't supposed to have been announced this early or under these circumstances.
(Coursey'd always been a Windows guy, and fairly pro-Microsoft. He barely gave Apple a nod. But earlier this year, he undertook the now-famous "Month on a Mac", which extended to three months and perhaps longer because he didn't want to have to send his iMac back. He's now as likely as any Mac rumor site to write a column on Apple happenings, and he's as critical of Windows XP and Microsoft (and Palladium) as one could hope. And to dispel any accusations of favoritism, he spent a "Month on Linux", which recently ended; he concluded that Linux had a lot of things to recommend it, but not as a consumer desktop OS. No, he's a Mac guy now, at least in large part-- and presuming that Apple isn't paying him off, he's a prime example of someone who's willing to open his mind and have it changed through first-hand experience.)
Coursey's now interviewed the same people Levy has, and he's come to the same kinds of conclusions-- though, perhaps because he didn't go through the indoctrination procedure (evidently he was too busy being inculcated in the Tablet PC propaganda intended to convince him that the fact that Microsoft's handwriting recognition sucks Tiger Eyes is immaterial because "handwriting recognition doesn't matter"), his challenge to Microsoft is couched in more severe terms. Coursey isn't impressed. He wants answers to the questions that we're all asking: namely, what the hell business does Microsoft, the creator of 90% of all security holes in software today, have in undertaking to become the sole guardian of all of our digital identities and rights and capabilities and data? Who in their right mind trusts Microsoft to write security software?
The TalkBack people seem to agree with him, though I'm not reading anything but the titles on the posts. Nobody seems to have any faith in Microsoft's ability to pull this off-- the consensus is that this will be a disaster on an unprecedented scale. Nobody wants to see it happen. We know that computing will be fundamentally different in terms of security and privacy ten years from now-- but we know that Microsoft isn't the company we want to see do it.
And now that the cat's out of the bag early, there's time for the outrage to spread, and maybe do some good.
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| Monday, July 1, 2002 |
17:58 - Xserve Ships Today
http://zdnet.com.com/2100-1103-940871.html
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The Xserve began shipping today, as did a press release claiming 4,000 pre-orders and showing those competitive performance specs that they refused to give at the unveiling last month. If they're independently verifiable, they need not have worried:
Apple also released benchmark data that it claims shows Xserve's merits over servers from Dell Computer, IBM and Sun Microsystems. Apple claims that running the Apache server, Xserve can support 60 percent more connections--4,051 per second vs. 2,547 per second--than the IBM eServer x330. Apple also claims that using the four-drive configuration, Xserve provides sustained throughput of 110MB vs. 70MB for Dell's PowerEdge 1650.
"The results of the benchmark tests indicate that the product has some competitive position with IBM, Sun and Dell," Technology Business Research analyst Tim Deal said. "It…adds credibility for any market Apple wants to get into--but certainly the corporate market."
Hell yeah, I should say so.
There are some comments by a Gartner analyst, which reveal some points that I didn't know were true:
Xserve's most important role for Apple could be bolstering the company's position in digital media streaming.
"The majority of (digital) content is created using QuickTime," said Gartner analyst Paul-Jon McNealy. QuickTime is Apple's media creation-and-playback technology that competes with RealOne from RealNetworks and Windows Media from Microsoft.
But most of that content is then converted to the competing formats, which have more market share than QuickTime. The competing formats mean that consumers must use multiple players if they want full access to all the streaming content on the Web.
Isn't that a pisser? All that Real and Windows Media content that people suck down all the time is most likely produced first in QuickTime, using Apple tools-- and then converted to the other formats.
I don't think anywhere near enough people realize how crucial Apple is behind the scenes, in areas where we don't usually see them. Stuff like QuickTime, Final Cut Pro, and now all this new video-editing and audio-sequencing stuff that they're buying up, to say nothing of the Xserve-- from Apple's corporate viewpoint, this whole battle-for-the-desktop thing almost seems like a side issue, compared to the magnitude of the installed base that relies upon their software because there is simply nothing like it for Windows.
Something big's a-brewing, it would seem to me. Apple's bought something like the five biggest market leaders in audio/video editing and production software over the past couple of years. What the hell kind of monstrous software package are they preparing to unleash upon us?
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16:17 - THE MOOD IS ABOUT TO CHANGE
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I just got a piece of unsolicited e-mail that appears to be a mailing-list subscription message; if I'm reading it right, I've just been signed up, quite without my knowledge, for a Yahoo group called "Ar Rahman ~The International Islamic Foundation".
The welcome message was blank; the group's goals seem to be about general Islamic discussion, prayer timetables and stuff-- nothing sinister on the surface.
Then there's this footer at the bottom of the intro message:
~THE MOOD IS ABOUT TO CHANGE...~
...Really? To what? From what?
I guess I'll see soon enough...
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13:42 - The Silent Steamroller
http://www.applelinks.com/articles/2002/07/20020701130427.shtml
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While people dish about the appropriateness of the Switch campaign for consumers and home users and programmers and IT managers and dominatrices, Apple's steamroller of a M&A division is quietly trundling through the A/V industry like a glacier.
Today they bought Emagic, a company that makes software called Logic, which is evidently the software package of choice for "over 200,000 musicians around the world", and "dominates the market for sequencing software", according to The Register.
Macintosh-based products account for over 65 percent of Emagic's current revenues. Emagic's Windows-based product offerings will be discontinued on September 30, 2002.
Heh heh heh.
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13:28 - The Opposite of the Dell Dude
http://www.applelust.com/alust/oped/Editorials/Archives/carsona_dell.shtml
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Andrew E. Carson at AppleLust shares the letter that he'd written to Apple in hopes of being chosen for the "Switchers" campaign.
He's right-- the experience he describes is too personal, too detailed and technical for Apple to have been able to turn it into a 15-second sound bite. But it's the kind of letter that a lot of us would have written; and if you can, try to picture what the ad campaign would have looked like if it were letters like these that were chosen.
Would the Switchers have come across as brainwashed and deluded simpletons?
Or would they have appeared as obsessive tree-hugging theorists, babbling endlessly about things like "intuitiveness" and "design" and "style" and "happiness"?
Convincing die-hard Windows people of the Mac's viability is a long process with lots of steps. First you have to prove that you're someone worth listening to-- your first hurdle is to demonstrate that using a Mac does not instantly imply that you're a crazed zealot that you'd better hurry away from, or a computer-illiterate AOL zombie who thinks that the guy who says "You've got mail!" has a "really cool voice".
And only then do you get to move on to the next step: convincing the person that Windows has problems that shouldn't be there.
But OS X was immediately different. If I were to take my psychology (minus the bouts of irrationality and neuroticism) and impress it on a motherboard, the result would be something startlingly similar to OS X. And I told Apple so.
Okay, chix aside for a moment. How did you get inside my head? I mean, that's the only explanation. When I use OS X, it's like an extension of my own mind. When I save a file, it is stored exactly where I think it should be stored. No more saving a file and then having to search my entire HD to find it again -- only to discover it in a folder that a) I have never seen before, and b) whose name makes zero sense.
But astonishingly, most Windows users not only see this kind of ludicrous workflow as "the way things are", but become downright hostile to the notion that there's a better way. It still surprises the hell out of me that this is the case, but this-- getting the person to accept that Microsoft's way of making you do things is broken-- is the most difficult of all the steps.
Afterwards comes the demonstration that Apple's solutions are superior. This is the easy part. Once you have someone who is willing to look, willing to give your side-by-side demos a fair shake, then the game is yours. If he's open-minded, you've already won, because the software is so easily demonstrated to be superior. Just show them how iTunes can keep track of files no matter where you move them on your system, because of unique file IDs, which WinAmp can't do because Windows doesn't have a good enough filesystem; or show them how to rip an entire CD with one click, and burn a CD with another, which makes Windows Media Player look like a DOS utility by comparison. It's as compelling as a demonstration of gravity. It's open-and-shut.
The big hurdles are in getting those minds open in the first place.
And that's why the Dvorak-esque reaction to the Switch ads has been so hard for me to take. Thousands and thousands of people are being forced to think about their computers not being the only solution out there; they're being challenged with the notion that there's a better choice available than the one they made. And so out come their antibodies, their defenses against having to take that challenge seriously. To a man, they've never used a Mac, or at least not recently. They've never played with OS X, with iTunes or iPhoto or iMovie. They've never used Watson or experimented with column view or made custom icons. They don't have to. They know they're right. They know Windows is better. They know Macs suck.
Almost nobody who's demonstrably open-minded and willing to give Apple a fair shot is anti-Apple. That really ought to tell us something. Microsoft certainly can't boast that.
If the Switch campaign keeps up the pressure, those antibodies will have to run out eventually.
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12:50 - Random Thought
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Is it just me, or is there no less sexy thing you can possibly call someone than "baby"?
I mean, what the hell?
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12:02 - California Dreamin'
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You know, it's really sort of disconcerting to discover how disconnected one can become from general, popular, non-blogosphere-related opinion when one goes on vacation from the computer.
While in Nashville, for example, one friend that I met there-- who is otherwise a very fun guy, very talented and very sensible-- spent one car ride from one point to another on a little ranting tangent. It went sort of like this:
It's so ridiculous, this whole "War on Terrorism" thing. I mean, you declare war on a country, not a person-- and it was just one person behind 9/11. But no, now we're being condemned by every country in the world for going in and effectively nuking a third-world country-- I mean, what was the point of going in and bombing Afghanistan into the Stone Age? They were already in the Stone Age! ... And you know it's all just because we're helping out the Israelis. I don't understand why we're helping the Israelis in the first place...
"Because the Israelis are a capitalistic, freedom-loving democracy who has made the desert bloom, and the Muslim nations fighting against them are a bunch of medieval, fascistic, petty-warlord-based fanatical theocracies whose stated goal is the destruction of the West", I didn't say. No, I bit my tongue in the interest of harmony. But nobody's keeping me from blogging this.
I must admit, Nashville wasn't a place where I would have expected to find rampant anti-globo and anti-Zionist and anti-US-policy flowing. I come from Silicon Valley to Tennessee and find myself in a liberal swing so hard the wheel's locked against the stop? Whatever. But it seems to me that if one doesn't look terribly hard at the details behind any of the news that filters by on CNN's headline crawl, it's pretty easy to conclude that we deserve every blown-up building in New York or Tel Aviv. After all, quoting Churchill out of context is always a quick and easy way to appear cultured; talk about making the rubble bounce, and you're sure to get people nodding sagely about how stupid we are to have done anything but declare the 19 hijackers to have been adequately punished for their crimes by the suicide itself, and since they obviously acted alone, do nothing to root out any so-called state-sponsored terrorist organization that may or may not have sent them.
But, like I said, I didn't say a word. And if it's any consolation to me, most everybody else in the group seemed to be sitting in a throat-clearing silence as well, and a quick change of subject got things rolling again. But I tell you, I'm glad for more reasons than just the humidity to be back in California.
While we were on the disc golf course, I was musing to one of the guys about how no matter how expensive it is to rent housing around here, I'd still rather live in California than anywhere else. He looked genuinely surprised, and wanted to know why. I hadn't really thought about it, actually, and as I lined up my shot all I could say was, "The weather rocks, the food is excellent, and the people rule."
But I've traveled now to every part of the US except for Alaska, and I can say quite confidently that living anywhere else is just not something I could imagine. Maybe Oregon or Washington, sure-- but there's just something special about this state, whether our governor is corrupt and our power is expensive and in short supply or not.
Maybe it's the landscape. The mountains around here are spectacular, I'm sorry-- and it isn't until I visit other areas of the country (e.g. the South), where the landscape is one anonymous wooded rolling hill after another, where you can't see any interesting topography on the horizon, where the lenticular haze in the air makes distant clouds fade into indistinct light-gray ghosts at the edge of vision, where the only interesting objects breaking up the line of trees are the sixty-foot fast-food restaurant signs that cluster around freeway exits like redwood groves-- that I understand just how special a thing it is to see burly and severe hills thirty or forty miles away, the fog rolling over them through the low passes, the detail on their sides and around the edges of the fog and clouds as crisp as though they were right above your head. Being able to drive up Quimby Road and see the dark and light patches on Mt. Tamalpais north of the Golden Gate, sixty miles away, is something that makes my heart race. Maybe not everybody's... but mine, yes indeed it does.
Maybe it's that in the urban areas, space is at such a premium that the roads themselves take on personalities. Go ten miles outside the Bay Area and suddenly you're in rural farmland-- but within the city, each street has a history and a face. Lawrence Expressway. Montague Expressway. San Tomas Expressway. El Camino Real. You can stand on a Civil War battlefield and know that the Blue and the Gray fought right there on that spot-- but somehow it isn't as real as standing on a bustling commuter artery that you know two hundred years ago connected the Spanish missions up and down the coast, and was just as vital a thoroughfare as it is today.
Maybe it's that here, people are friendly but not invasive. Stand at a bus stop with strangers, and you'll get smiles and nods all around, but no boisterous and paternal conversation or stories about people's home lives. Everybody here is understood to be a mover and/or a shaker, and we figure that if that person over there wanted to be talked to, he or she would have said so. So: no outright hostility, á la New York. No insincere, forced smarminess, what a friend called "Minnesota Friendly" while I was visiting him in Minneapolis. No eerie sense that you're being sized up and judged, like in the South. Just laid back live-and-let-live.
But probably what it is, most of all, is the weather. Where else but LA can you wear shorts and a t-shirt at 4:00 in the morning in January? Where else but LA or San Jose (or, well, Hawaii) can you live comfortably in a house that has neither central heating nor air conditioning? In the South, I've found, the rain likes to leap out from behind doors, dump buckets on you, kick you in the balls, and then run away. Lightning storms are the rule, not the exception; over the course of a day you can expect to see it go from partly-cloudy to thundering rainstorm to tornado-watch and back, all without the temperature dropping below 90. But in California, if it's going to rain, you know it: it comes over the horizon, squaring its shoulders, rubs its hands together, and says, "Hey! I'm gonna rain now!" The people yell back, "Okay!" And then the rain goes about its business, gets everything nice and soaked for two or three days, wrings itself out, and leaves. "See you in November!" it calls back over its shoulder.
I know it pisses people off no end to hear Californians talk about "dry heat", but honestly I have to say that it's got to be one of the most fundamental issues behind regional personality differences in this country. The weather here is our friend. I can walk around outside in 114-degree heat on an August day in Ukiah, because the humidity is under 25%. But in Atlanta or Nashville, 85 degrees is unbearable, and 95 is agony. We came out of an air-conditioned Murfreesboro video store a couple of nights ago into what I thought was going to be the cool night air. But instead of feeling a crisp breeze prickling my skin, my glasses fogged up. I'm serious. A cloud had just done a drive-by raining at the intersection there about an hour before, and now the air was so laden with moisture and so hot that it was like stepping into a particularly aggressive sauna.
I don't mean to degrade an entire region for its weather; I really don't. But to have to scuttle painfully from doorway to car, and from car to doorway, hoping your anti-perspirant holds out for just one more minute until you can get to the shelter of the vents-- that's just no way to live. Skulking in fear of the very air, from air-conditioned haven to air-conditioned haven-- it's enough to make one wonder, as one of the guys living there even said, how anybody ever survived there before air conditioning existed. I wonder what life there was like when that technology was brand-new and just being adopted?
I have to say, though, that I can see what kinds of personalities can come from these different kinds of climates. In California, the weather isn't your enemy. It goes about its business, you go about yours-- and so the people behave similarly. But in the South, and indeed in the Midwest and some parts of the East Coast, or anywhere where the humidity is that oppressive-- well, growing up where air conditioning is an inextricable part of life, and where rain can come kung-fu kicking at you from any direction at any time, I can easily see how one might grow up spoiled, dependent upon technology, unwilling to bear hardships in the natural world if there's any choice in the matter. Those people who are able to hike or jog or even play golf in such an environment I admire greatly, and in particular those who are able to cultivate an appreciation for the natural world against a backdrop where that world so vividly represents an adversary. But if you're looking for a reason why religion seems to have taken such hold in the South, I say that the weather's got to have a lot to do with it. In no other region is it so apparent that we're at the mercy of higher powers, and that God-- with his air-conditioned churches-- is on our side.
I don't mean to sound as though I hate these other regions. I don't. Indeed, if it weren't for the humidity (and possibly the church density), I'd find Nashville to be a charming and livable place. But ... well, you know, getting off the plane in San Jose, standing next to the shuttle bus to long-term parking with the sun beating down on me and yet my hands remaining dry and not a drop of sweat on me-- when I ask my brain what the possibility would be of my moving away, its immediate response is, What, are you nuts?
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09:57 - The Products Speak for Themselves
http://brian.carnell.com/articles/2002/06/000046.html
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Glenn Reynolds and Brian Carnell take turns harshing on the Hey, Arnold! movie and regretting having been forced to sit through it. Evidently it's trite, cheap, and has no real bearing on the show it comes from-- which, I admit, I haven't seen (the closest I'm willing to come to having rugrats of any kind in my house, with apologies to Lileks, is watching Baby Blues on Adult Swim).
Reynolds also disses the plot, which was one long anti-gentrification screed. But more than just the plot, the movie lacked completely the quirky atmosphere that makes the television show so much fun. There is a lot of ambiguity in the characters and situations in the show (which is one of its strengths -- it avoids the moral platitudes and mini-lectures that adults always want to insert into kids' shows), so it was weird seeing this simplistic black-and-white morality tale. Much of the time the movie looked like what Hey, Arnold! might be if the idiots responsible for Fern Gully took over the show.
Funny-- that's exactly the impression I got of the movie from the trailers. I remember immediately thinking, "These anti-corporate 'Oh, no, save the neighborhood from the evil black-suited corporate capitalists' angsty hippie storylines are sort of anachronistic these days, aren't they?" I mean, come on-- here we are trying to explain to the anti-globalization people why they're such morons for wanting to destroy McDonald's and the Gap and convince everybody to grow their own food and weave their own clothes, presumably because such things are eeeeevil-- and where does sentiment come from? Movies like Hey, Arnold!, it seems to me. This kind of story doesn't tell us anything new. It's just more yammering away on the same old note, one that has been ringing hollow since the days of Wayne's World. And especially so these past eight months.
Meanwhile, though, where I was seeing this trailer over and over-- and being thankful that I wasn't seeing the movie itself-- was in front of Lilo & Stitch, which I think is simply marvelous. Now, much as I know I should be boycotting Disney as a truly evil empire with aspirations that I can't condone, there is no way for me to deny that they make a superior product. When they decide to do break away from their money-making formula, they can produce some of the best stuff ever seen on this planet-- they still attract the very best creative people in the industry, and when you put all those people together in a building, there's a magic that gets produced that no amount of corporate greed or agenda can quell. Whereas Microsoft seems incapable of doing anything truly excellent, Disney keeps proving over and over again that they deserve every inch of their lead. (It's their choices that prove the quality of the company, though, not their capabilities-- to paraphrase Dumbledore.)
There is so much good about Lilo & Stitch that I won't bother listing more than three, at the risk of leaving out a whole pile of stuff that you're better off just experiencing in the theater.
- Stitch's character design is some of the best, most original work I've seen in years. Not just his visual structure, either-- his movement and his characterization. It's just brilliant. It's so complex that there's a ton of stuff you don't even get to see fleshed out, and that's the mark of greatness.
- Lilo, as a character, pulls off the impossible: a kid that I find cute and even appealing. She's precocious, but not in that Calvin or Bart Simpson or South Park or Home Movies kind of way-- you know, where the kids are just miniature adults, dealing with the same issues as the adults do and just as astutely. That kind of thing is good for laughs, but it's getting a bit trite, methinks. But that's because it's so much harder to do what they've done with Lilo: she's nuts, feeding the fish that controls the weather, taking pictures of fat tourists, and making her astute observations about raw and visceral emotions-- love and family-- that is absent from the sarcastic and cynical dishing that we usually see from the kids-smarter-than-the-adults shows. Again, brilliant.
- The interaction between Lilo and Nani-- particularly during that fight through the house that they have early in the movie-- is some of the most realistic human interaction that I have ever seen animated. Seriously. It makes the mouth hang open at how far this stuff has come from the metaphorical shorthand of fairy-tale animation. Maybe we'll one day experience a return to the traditional elision of stark realism in human characterization, but I for one think what we have today is outstanding.
First The Emperor's New Groove, and now this. And from the way things are going, this time Disney might actually have a box-office and merchandising success on their hands, something they haven't been able to do with a non-Pixar movie since The Lion King. And they so desperately need such a success to keep them from being evil. If this encourages them to keep making ground-breaking movies, where the big-budget effects take a backseat to the writing and the characterizations (in an extension of what's been so successful lately with Cartoon Networks' gold shows), like NASA's shoestring projects that got so much done for so little money before they imploded under quality shortcuts-- I'm all for it. As long as they don't end up like NASA.
It's easy to hate Microsoft, isn't it? Because everybody hates Windows. But it's just so damned hard to hate things like Lilo & Stitch.
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| Sunday, June 30, 2002 |
20:57 - SSHazam
http://docs.info.apple.com/article.html?artnum=120131
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So it seems that while I was out, Apple released a security patch for the recently publicized SSH security hole, not two days after the fix was committed by the OpenSSH maintainers. Apple's patch comprises new versions of OpenSSH, OpenSSL, and Apache.
According to MacInTouch, the update still has a problem in the SSL components-- something that was addressed in a later update at CERT. (This whole SSH upgrade thing has been a major fiasco-- no fewer than three revisions of the OpenSSH patch were released for FreeBSD and other platforms, over the course of those two days, before they finally got it right.) Apple has evidently chosen to plug the most egregious hole first, and address the remaining bits in another update which we should expect within a few days. The same goes for the resolver vulnerability that has also been uncovered.
The crux of this, though, is that this is the incident and response that we were all waiting for that would prove Apple's commitment to being an earnest member of the UNIX vendor community. Previous security holes have had responses from Apple within a week or two-- about on par with companies like Sun and HP, but not competitive with what Linux and FreeBSD and Windows admins tend to want. (Windows patches are sometimes very timely, and sometimes lag by months.) People have had their eye on Apple to see how they would react to the "next big hole"-- it would be a make-or-break for the company in many server admins' eyes.
And considering the speed with which they've released this fix, I think they've laid down a pretty respectable line in the sand. Kudos to 'em.
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20:38 - Back to the routine...
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I'm back from a nice long weekend visiting friends in the Nashville area. I enjoyed it a great deal-- playing disc golf, watching movies, meeting all kinds of new people who all seemed to know who I was-- quite an unusual experience, but not one I'm going to complain about.
Well, except for one thing: This trip did nothing to quell my hatred and loathing for cell phones. And that's all I'm gonna say about that.
Overall a trip to remember. And now back to the bit mines...
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| Thursday, June 27, 2002 |
08:25 - Justice is served
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What do I think of MCI/WorldCom folding? Good riddance, I say. They put those horrible long-distance phone ads on my TV, and they used Anderson to do their books-- the preferred method of late-90s conglomerates for Making $$$ Fast. Serves 'em right.
I refuse to give any of my money to any of these leeches who put ads with Carrot Top and Mr. T and Alf on TV. I swear, long-distance phone company ads are the worst thing about TV in this day and age, far worse than sex or violence or even the current season of Dexter's Lab. My phone exists for me to order pizza once a week, and I have absolutely no interest in using it for any purpose beyond that. I call long-distance maybe once a month. I can eat the bloody three bucks or whatever it is. If they want me to change that, they'd better get those damned ads off my TV.
No sympathy at all. Here's hoping AT&T or whoever does 1-800-COLLECT is next.
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08:13 - Legacy of the 50s
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The answering machine of the atheist plaintiff in the Pledge of Allegiance case has been overflowing with "personal and scary" messages ever since the verdict was handed down; he's had to move his daughter, whom he was originally concerned with being "injured" by having to say under God, to a "safe place".
Now, even though I'm about as non-religious as they come, and a fierce proponent of the separation of church and state, I agree that this verdict was ridiculous and should be overturned. We made our bed in 1954, and now we have to lie in it.
But, you know, I don't think it speaks very well of religious people's supposed ethical superiority for them to be leaving death threats on someone's answering machine.
He's not Salman Rushdie, you know.
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08:10 - Itty Bitty Nitty-Gritty Committee
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(Posting wirelessly from the airport, I am.)
With the G8 conference going on near Calgary, there's a group of anti-globalization protesters near there called the "Revolutionary Knitting Committee". They're sitting on the steps of the government buildings and knitting scarves and sweaters; their message is that "not all your clothes have to come from massive corporations".
Do these people have anything useful to contribute?
Knit me a pair of jeans for less than $20 and we'll talk. Then do it for each of my quarter billion friends, and see if you can still do it as a gathering of kindly little grannies with knitting needles, instead of becoming (gasp) a giant corporation.
You pathetic twits.
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| Wednesday, June 26, 2002 |
00:14 - I'm outta here...
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Unless anything earth-shattering happens in the morning, this is probably the last post I'll be making until Sunday night; I'll be out on vacation until then. Here's hoping the world hangs together...
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17:34 - Trailers, we got trailers
http://movie-list.com/l/lordoftheringstrilogy.shtml
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There are two new trailers for The Two Towers to be found online: a two-minute one that's awesomely cool, and a 3:30 one that's like the first one squared in terms of coolness (though it's a bootleg made with a camcorder in a theater, so it's all flickery).
Go get 'em, tiger.
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17:14 - Nasssty Elveses!
http://gtexts.blogspot.com/2002_06_16_gtexts_archive.html#77950793
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I've seen this link kicking around various special-interest regions lately: it's an analysis of why the Elves in Middle-Earth aren't all they're cracked up to be.
Pretty silly and fun. But it also makes one think about the "mythological racism" inherent in stories like Tolkien's. All the merit that various characters have is in their bloodline and the purity of their ancestry, not in their deeds-- or at least, their deeds come to fulfill the high expectations that people have because of their blood. Star Wars has the same kind of thing going.
I've often thought about how the reason why we like stories like LotR and Star Wars is that it gives us a license to indulge in a kind of social outlook that's not politically-correct to espouse in real life; it's escapist fantasy, where racism not only has no negative connotations (anybody who is oppressed because of his or her race, effectively, deserves it), but it is the height of honorable aspiration.
I spent a lot of time being troubled by this, before eventually just deciding "Y'know, screw it"-- it's a story, and I think I (and most people) are capable of handling it as such, and separating it from real life. Just as it's folly to imagine that Quake causes kids to shoot up schoolyards, a study that sets out to prove that Tolkien's writings have inspired generations of white supremacists would probably turn up some pretty sparse results.
UPDATE: Aha-- I knew I remembered reading something high-profile about this before. David Hilvert sends me these two links to thoughts by David Brin on this very subject, both definitely worth reading if the above paragraphs haven't already made you reach for your mouse:
ttp://www.salon.com/ent/movies/feature/1999/06/15/brin_main/
http://www.kithrup.com/brin/starwarsarticle2.html
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Brian Tiemann
